Underneath the Law Review Submission Process: Part XII The Elusive Fall Cycle

During my last visit to Prawfs I did a series of posts on the Law Review submission process.  With a little help from the BYU Law Review, I did a bit of research into submissions and the timing of submissions.  I also did some interviews with articles editors with tips for faculty and some interviews with faculty members with tips for current articles editors. 

Several people asked if I could do something similar to investigate the elusive fall law review submission period.  I've done a little research on this and will do a few posts, though I don't think I've really learned as much as I had hoped about this cycle.  And unfortunately I don't think this information will conclusively resolve any of the questions some of us have: which cycle is better fall or winter? when is the best time to submit my piece? what is with all of the rejections or (worse?) silence from the law reviews?  But I think the information may be helpful to some people who want to get a sense of the volume of articles submitted during each cycle and when the submissions occur.  That way, we can continue to be superstitious and submit on the day/week we always submit and now how some numbers to back up our superstition.

As always, some disclaimers before I give you the numbers.  BYU Law Review was again willing to give me some numbers during their fall submission window (Thanks especially to Heath Waddingham and Joe Orien for this).  BYU may be unique and is just one law review, so take this for what it is.  Obviously, a study of a random sample of law reviews would be better.  Or better yet getting data from Expresso.  Also, BYU's submission window was relatively short this year.  They "opened" submissions from Expresso from August 11-August 31.  Those three weeks were all they needed to pick up the articles necessary to fill their volumes.  Certainly the fall submission cycle goes beyond August 31 but BYU closed by labor day and so I don't have any numbers beyond August 31 (I think that in itself can be a lesson to some of us who tend to submit after labor day that some law reviews fill their issues before we have even submitted).  If any other law reviews want to give us information on submission numbers later in the fall, that would be really great.  I'm happy to post them or if you want to just give us information in the comments, that would be helpful.  In my next post, I'll compare the fall numbers with the winter numbers just so we can get a sense of the difference in volume.

Ok, so here is a chart of the numbers of submissions during three weeks of the Fall law review submission cycle:

And here is another one just showing which days of the week (during this three week period between Aug 11-31) the submissions were most prevalent:

And the final chart in this post:

I was surprised at how early the fall submission cycle started.  While some of us are still in August vacation mode, others are busy churning out law review articles for submission.  Impressive.  More next time with comparisons.